While lying in bed unable to sleep recently, I remembered a tweet from 2020 that stood out to me when I first encountered it. It came from Elon Musk. I was working an overnight shift, and I believe the tweet came in late summer.
(I don’t have Twitter anymore and the timing of the tweet doesn’t necessarily matter, but if someone wants to look it up to see if it still exists, feel free to link in the comments if found.)
The tweet: “The Age of Napoleon by Will & Ariel Durant is an amazing book”
If you’re not familiar with Will Durant, he wrote an 11-volume set of books covering Eastern and Western civilizations called The Story of Civilization. The Age of Napoleon is the last book of the set. I’ve been able to find a quote from Musk regarding the entire set, in which he recommends it. And perhaps it’s possible to find quotes that pertain specifically to each of the books. But that would be found through further research. The tweet above is notable because I’m drawing it from memory.
I obviously don’t have to go into detail regarding what the world was like in late summer of 2020. It was aflame, both literally and figuratively. And Musk had become quite outspoken about his growing discontent, especially regarding California restrictions.
Not now nor at the time did I think that Musk might become some sort of American Napoleon. But I would not be surprised if Musk views himself as being on a Napoleonic pursuit. And if so, good for him. That is not me coming out as a Musk fan-boy, and nor is it me saying that he could ever achieve what Napoleon did. It is simply the expression of admiration for a man who’s on a mission.
The debate about whether Musk is “on our side” doesn’t appeal to me because at the moment I’m not sure that it matters. He’s going to do things that we both like and dislike. Napoleon himself could be a walking contradiction. He was only ideological in that his ideology was to grab power, act, and then grab some more power.
In a recent biography I read, Napoleon talked of being against the banning of books. Not long after, he did a little book-purging. We can be mad at him for that. Or we can observe, and act accordingly.